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Clonezilla?
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clonezilla -
put it on usb and boot to the usb
select diso to disk, clone - advanced (not "beginner") and look for setting "do not check disk size"
then just use the defaults, and it should clone from one disk to the other.
more
https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone
You're going about this the wrong way.
Use Clonezilla or the more user-friendly Rescuezilla to do this. They will make much easier-to-manage backups that are only as large as the contents of your drive, whereas DD is doing exactly what you're telling it to do.
Why are you "constantly re-downloading linux and reinstalling it"? Linux isn't Windows, it doesn't really benefit from fresh reinstalls the way Windows does after a certain amount of time.
I've used CloneZilla, it's pretty basic but does the job. People seem to be enthusiastic about Fog but I can't speak from personal experience. If you actually want a cheap deployment solution instead of a bit-for-bit copy, I recommend Windows Deployment Services.
Kali is a highly specialized tool.
I wouldn't use it as my day to day Linux distribution for the same reason that I wouldn't use Clonezilla for anything other than cloning my system. :)
Since they'll have physical access, how will you prevent them from just tabbing out to the host and installing the software on there? Plus any plugged in USB devices would just go to the host, unless you set it to automatically redirect everything straight to the guest. I don't think using a VM offers very strong protection against someone with physical access to the powered-on machine.
If you're serious about keeping your data safe then buy a cheap external HDD and use Clonezilla Live to create an encrypted clone of the disk image, wipe the SSD, then when you're over the border use Clonezilla Live to restore the disk image. This can be a good habit to get into for keeping encrypted backups in general as well
Boot to this:
https://osdn.net/projects/clonezilla/downloads/69912/clonezilla-live-2.5.6-22-amd64.iso/
Write to usb with this:
Read disk to disk instructions:
Yeah I would. Maybe something like this: https://clonezilla.org but I never used it myself.
dd isn’t what I would use in this scenario, mainly because you’re backing up the entire drive including unallocated & slack space which is probably pointless. Nor would I put it through gzip as this may complicate mounting the image should you choose to do that. Fine if you want a total 1:1 image and only intend to blow it back to another drive of equal or larger size.
Personally I would use Guymager from a forensic live CD and output as EWF but that’s just because I’m familiar with that stuff. (and that would also back up unallocated etc)
I've always used Clonezilla in the disk image to external storage workflow, but it looks like it supports direct disk to disk cloning too. See here, Disk to disk clone
I would assume Acronis, which u/NotAnNSASpySatellite mentioned, probably has this functionality too!
Once you've imaged the disk, you'll probably need to move the Windows recovery partition (I'm assuming it's Windows) to the right if you want to expand the size of your C:\ drive instead of creating another partition.
At least on my installation, it looked something like this:
- Partition 1 - 100 MB: System Reserved
- Partition 2 - 100 GB: System (C:) Drive
- Partition 3 - 800 MB: Recovery Partition
So to get a larger partition #2, I needed to move partition #3 to the right.
My favorite way to do this is with a Ubuntu Live ISO and the GParted GUI. Here's a guide that might help, How to Resize Your Ubuntu Partitions
could do a fresh install and once you have everything installed the way you like it clonezilla your disk off onto another disk/usb drive. then once you want to reinstall clonezilla back your saved state. I do this when I move drives or before I install hardware risky drovers but it makes a perfect clone of your hard drive.
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Are you talking about disk imaging ? If so lookup clonezilla. Its simple to use but can get pretty advanced if you wish to dabble with it. It can clone your entire partition or disk should you choose to do it. Its fairly easy to do and works fine when you need to revert your system. This is a good video, that helped me.
You can use clonezilla, which is distro/OS-agnostic and can be downloaded from their website as an iso and burned onto a USB stick. From there, plug in an external hdd and boot the clonezilla iso. Then just follow the instructions and you’ll have a backed up image of your OS on the external hdd.
Plugging in the USB stick and your external hdd, and then restoring it is a very similar process.
I did this a few weeks back with my arch installation and it worked great.
Here’s a YouTube tutorial if you find that a friendlier medium
I think you need to rethink what you are trying to do. Why are you trying to run VMs and install a web interface on top of a OS that was not meant for this kind of thing?
Just install Proxmox as a bare-metal hypervisor, then recreate whatever you have running now (ubuntu 18.04) as a VM.
If you don't want to redo your current Ubuntu 18.04 setup, and that's why you are trying to find a way to build it on top of it, just save yourself the trouble later and do it now. You can use Clonezilla (https://clonezilla.org/) to copy your entire hard drive and clone it back inside your VM.
If you really don't want to redo your bare-metal for some other reasons, perhaps rethink VMs and look at containers instead. Ubuntu comes with LXD which is not a full VM environment, but may be close-enough for what you want: https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/lxd.html.en
I recommend Clonezilla (https://clonezilla.org/). I use it all the time to backup my system (Windows 10/Mint 19) and it's never failed me. It can backup partitions or entire devices.
We have a dedicated VLAN on our workbench that is for imaging our machines and just have them PXE boot into the environment. Right now we do up to 6 machines at a time. We could do more if we had more space. But it has worked awesome for us the past 4 years that I've introduced it to the company. Before this they were configuring every machine from scratch. We get them imaged with basics from Clonezilla then use PDQ Deploy to do any post configurations that need to but done after sysprep.
>System specs: Windows 10 Home 64 bit i7-4790K @4 GHz 8 CPUs 16 GB ram Adobe Premiere CC 2019
OK, this system sounds nominally old. The i7-4790K came out in 2015, but it may have enough oomph to hang in there, since it sounds like it's got enough power for your needs.
You may want to try replacing any compressed media (like H.264) with less compressed version encoded with a less compressed editing codec, like DNxHR.
However I think what's more likely here is your hard disk is dying. The warranty on those things are only 1-3 years, and I generally don't trust any drive older than three, except in very specific situations. If you're running original hard disks in that thing I'd replace them ASAP. They're probably on death's doorstep.
You can use something like Clonezilla to avoid having to reinstall the OS and all your apps onto a new drive.
I like Clonezilla for disk imaging and cloning. It's free/open source, has a book CD/USB and uses standard Linux tools to so the job (dd and partclone).
Boot it and you can image disk to disk or save an image file on removal disk/on the network.
As it's most commonly used, Clonezilla creates a compressed image of the system being cloned. So, you don't clone the internal drive to an external one, rather, you write a Clonezilla image to the external drive. Clonezilla then uses that image to create a clone on the other drive. (As an added bonus, the image can be kept around as a backup.) BTW, the drive to which the image is written can be smaller than the drive being cloned.
Personally, I wouldn't mess around with shrinking partitions if I didn't need to. That's just something else that can go wrong.
Oh, and Clonezilla will clone an entire drive at once, multiple partitions, partition table, and all. It might be better/easier to simply do that than to clone each partition individually.
I don't think I understand, sorry pal.
If you want to keep your Documents, you can just transfer them to a USB stick and move them to your new Documents folder on the fresh install. If you want all the applications from the old PC, you'll need to reinstall them on the fresh OS or do a full disk clone with something like CloneZilla (https://clonezilla.org/)
I cloned a harddrive with https://clonezilla.org/ in the past (the system drive for my Linux server) and it went well.
If it's just a secondary drive then simply copying the files to the new drive should do the trick.
Distro
There are lots of good choices. I recommend Debian with the Cinnamon Desktop Environment. The setup is a little frustrating, and you'll probably want to add the non-free Repos and setup FlatHub, but once you do you will have an incredibly customizable environment.
Backups
Now that you are going all-in, you need to think about backups. You should mirror your entire hard drive to another storage device. That way you can unfuck any changes you made and get back to work fairly quickly.
You should have a plan to take regular backups.
Clonezilla is reliable software to do this with.
I'm kind of careless, so I just use dd.
as /u/idontchooseanid said, the openSUSE part at least is very simple, with one caveat -- if you clone the whole disk using a block-level tool like dd or clonezilla, DO NOT then allow both disks to be mounted simultaneously -- two partitions will both have the same partition UUID and everything will blow up. If you create new partitions and copy the contents, or if you change the copied partition's uuid before first mounting it, everything is ok.
See the first "gotcha" here: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Gotchas This is also mentioned in the clonezilla docs: https://clonezilla.org/fine-print-live-doc.php?path=./clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone/10-clone-finishes.doc
After cloning, if you did update the partition uuid's, you may have to update /etc/fstab and your bootloader config if they reference any disks by UUID.
Windows is more tricky, may work or may not depending on how their hardware licensing checks feel today.
it can create an image of the entire drive (with around 50% compression so it doesn't take up as much space) or just a specific partition: https://clonezilla.org/
it is usually written to a usb (or i think it is small enough to go on a cd) and booted live.
You can try https://clonezilla.org to be clear I have never used it, but at a glance it looks like it should be able to do what you want to do.
I have however, used Acronis True Image https://www.acronis.com/ this one costs around 50 dollars though, I don't know if you are willing to pay for it but that is an option.
Lmk if I can help further.
I can't think of a way of doing that live under Linux, sorry. With tools like Clonezilla or Fog Server you have to reboot the system, from live media or the network to capture the image.
I've used both and they work well.
Your best option is to get an external drive large enough and do a disk clone. Haven't used this myself but I've seen it recommended often enough:
Years ago I had a lemon laptop from HP and had to send it in several times to get it un-bricked. I took to removing the hard drive before sending it in. They didn't like it, but they managed.
Edit: Fixed a typo.
A KVM is going to switch a single keyboard/mouse/screen to multiple computers. It would show you whatever display you're on but it is completely unrelated to imaging.
You could go the hardware route and get a drive duplicator like this where you would build your main image, then sysprep (generalize/OOBE) and shut it down. It would clone the drive, partitions, etc to the other machines.
You could go the software route which would be capturing the image somehow (CloneZilla, Macrium, etc) capture the image to a flashdrive/file share and then you can apply the captured image to an identical machine.
If you're buying brand new machines for a company you usually can contact them and provide a copy of your image to Dell, HP, etc and they'll apply it for you.
I would not use dd for this - it clones the entire disk, including unallocated / unused space, so you end up with a huge image, even if you compress it. And if you ever want to restore the image to a disk other than the one it came from, it's pretty annoying.
I'd use Clonezilla instead - it will clone only the used space, allows you to select partitions (exclude swap...), has a text-gui, checks image integrity, and is easy to use.
What you need is disk to disk clone. There is a lot of software available to perform this operation. Its hard to recommend the software to because they all have their pro and cons but, if you are looking to do this with no budget then I would suggest Clonezilla. You can read about and download it here.
Use clonezilla to image the drive to external storage. There is a bootable version available here: https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php
Reinstall Windows and then mount the image you made in clonezilla to cherry pick the files you need to keep.
Let this be a lesson in "if you can't afford to loose it, you can't afford to not backup"
I use Clonezilla to create backups of my systems. Backing-up/restoring takes about an hour each for a full 256GB SSD drive to/from a 2TB HDD drive.
Another option (only to backup files) would be the GNOME app deja-dup which can be installed from the Kali repo.
apt install deja-dup
I typically use Clonezilla for this purpose. I boot into the live ISO (using PXE but that's optional), capture an image of the original drive, and store that image on external storage. Then I swap out the disks and restore the captured image to the new disk.
I can see this approach being problematic if your boot drive is quite large. Clonezilla has compression but if you've got a massive boot drive you may need to look elsewhere; unless of course you have plenty of external storage (this is r/DataHoarder).
Another alternative would be to hook up both drives to a single system, boot a Linux live ISO, and use dd to copy the disk block for block. This approach has the advantage of not requiring any external storage but is more technical to use than Clonezilla's GUI.
You don't mention the relative sizes of the disks. The two examples I gave work without any extra steps if the drives are the same size. If they're different sizes you may need to move partitions around if you want uninterrupted, contiguous space.
Finally, if you're moving from a HDD to a SSD, there's partition alignment to consider. Here's more on that, How to Speed Up Your Solid-State Drive by Re-Aligning Its Partitions. Hope this helps.
No problem, you shouldn't need to install a DHCP server on your server, the router should handle that, just make sure you don't have two DHCP servers on the same network as that can cause conflicts.
Happy to answer your questions - I have used this software before to Clone drives https://clonezilla.org and these instructions should help given you are restoring it to a disk with a larger size https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/11_lite_server/advanced/09-advanced-param.php
But if you have the 2TB drive mounted somewhere else and your OS is on the 256GB drive, you could move your execution (ETH1) and consensus (ETH2) install and data files over to that drive, most clients have parameters that you can configure to allow you to do this.
Linux after windows is a walk in the park, you'll likely be fine. However if you want to have peace of mind (I know it's a daunting task after all !) you can use a Clonezilla USB and a backup drive to make a full disk backup image on your backup disk before installing.
https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/02_Restore_disk_image
https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/01_Save_disk_image
Step by step guide. Read carefully.
I’ve only used savedisk for taking an image and restoredisk to clone multiple computers
I skip the checks and DO NOT ENCRYPT.
Once you get used to this, you can setup a clonezilla server and do multiple machines at once
This one is for Dell
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000129480/server-side-setup-and-client-setup-for-clonezilla
Keep in mind the speeds depending on what you use .
Usb 2.0 vs usb 3.0 and with server (switch speeds)
>I wanted to ask, is it possible to copy the data from the old SSD to the new SSD, so the software - raid will still work?
Using Clonezilla you can migrate the current system to a new drive by performing a disk-to-disk clone. https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/03\_Disk\_to\_disk\_clone
If you have a USB drive, there's a free utility called clonezilla that will work great.
Download the ISO at https://clonezilla.org/downloads/download.php?branch=stable
Download YUMI usb boot utility from https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/. Get the one called "UEFI YUMI"Run YUMI from within Windows.
Select Clonezilla from the dropdown list and pick the ISO you downloaded. This will make the USB drive bootable with Clonezilla.
If you can install both drives in the computer at the same time, that will make it much easier. Power off your computer and install the new drive.
Turn your computer and boot to the USB drive. Select Clonezilla and run it.
Follow the prompts CAREFULLY to clone from "Device to Device".
Make sure to pick your ORIGINAL drive as the "source" and your NEW drive as the "Destination" and leave all the other options as is.
Once the cloning is complete, shutdown the computer. Take your old hard drive out and the USB drive out. It should automatically boot to the new drive.
Clone your disk as it is currently by clonezilla.
Use Gparted from a live USB to to resize your partitions and to benefit from the disk space currently used by Windows.
Optional: run efibootmgr to clean up the efi partition.
Run update-grub.
Back up on a regular basis Mint.
>Use Disk2VHD or Starwinds converter to make an image of a drive. That image you can use to recover to a physical or virtual machine. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhdhttps://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-v2v-converter
>
>Also, you can use Clonezilla to make a disk-to-disk clone. https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/03\_Disk\_to\_disk\_clone
Thankyou !
Use clonezilla to back up the disk as a complete image. Keep it for factory resetting your machine. Install Linux anyway and if you need to send it back copy you data off and reset the disk with clonezilla.
Simples.
I would also like to know if there are any useful steps for a fresh install other than installing the official drivers from GPD. Here is what I did:
- Put Clonezilla on a micro SD card and booted it from the bios, before doing anything
- Saved a Clonezilla backup of the NVME on an external drive (it was only around 20GB or so, a USB thumb drive would also probably work)
- Booted normally and went through the Windows first time setup
- Used ProduKey to grab the Windows 10 Home key from the system and wrote it down (note this will ping Windows Defender as being malicious but it's fine)
- Put Windows 10 fresh installer on a micro SD card and booted it from the bios, installed Windows 10 and used the same key to activate it
- Switched from Portrait to Landscape in Display settings
- Installed the official GPD Win 3 drivers from their website
- Changed the TPD in the bios to "down" mode
I would say so, if you want minimal disruption to your login experience / apps / files. As long as you have an 8gb usb and are running Windows 10 you can download the Media Creation Tool and make an install USB and reinstall, no key or license info needed.
You'll need a tool to clone the drive, a quick search shows these two as recommended in other reddit posts:
https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
https://clonezilla.org/downloads/download.php?branch=stable
What brand ssd did you get? A lot of them come with clone software. Samsung has their own and Crucial uses acronis true image.
The gold standard is clonezilla for FOSS cloning software But it is a bit intense if you're not used to linux utilities. https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone
Clonezilla can make disk images (according to their documentation, and see also this tutorial, which is easier to read), but the problem would be installing a 500gb image to a 480gb drive...
How are you taking snapshots currently?
If you want to clone a disk/partition, you can use Clonezilla which is an amazing live image for disk cloning. You can chose to clone the entire disk (including the empty space, though it will be compressed), or the partition of your choice. When cloning an entire disk, your target disk must have at least the same capacity as your source disk.
Is the intent to add a second disk or a replacement?
If you just want to move to the new larger SSD grab a copy of Clonezilla
Copy the old 20GB drive to the new one and you're done.
If not it would be something like this (from memory -- it should be close)
fdisk /dev/sdb
n (new partition)
1 (enter)
Type Linux -- it used to be 83 I think it still is
W (Write)
Q (Quit)
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 (Formats the partition)
Find the UUID of sdb1
sudo lsblk -f
Edit /etc/fstab to add a mount point with the UUID and your done.
Run mount -a to make sure it worked.
You could use Clonezilla lite server. Or use the Microsoft way.
Unfortunately cloning machines has gotten much harder with modern Full Disk Encryption + TPM, UEFI booting, etc. We get a lot of questions about cloning machines on here from people that couldn't get it to work right. It may honestly be faster to just prep each individual machine. Just use the factory Windows install, install, your software on top, maybe run some tweaking script for some details, and/or do the rest via the login script or Active Directory, etc.
Clonezilla https://clonezilla.org/ can do disk images
NAS or USB drive can back them up (good use for old HDD's is to stick them in an enclosure)
Documents and application data is widely ok and transferrable to a large degree, depending
If you have a spare machine, consider testing it out there (old laptops make great test machines)
Yes. You can use something like Clonezilla or Macrium Reflect. Although, you will need to have a computer with two M.2 slots, or a USB to M.2 adapter for your second drive.
On your first bootup after cloning the drive, the only storage device that can be connected to the computer must be the new M.2 drive. Nothing else, no CD drives, USB drives, anything. Otherwise there will be issues.
> also how do I safely completely wipe my old m.2 ready to be sold again
You can't (shouldn't) erase it like a regular HDD. The BIOS typically has a secure erase function (newer computers do), or if you are proficient with Linux, you can use NVMe Secure Erase on an Ubuntu live USB or something.
You can absolutely clone HDDs to SSDs. You'll want to make sure the SSDs are the same size (or preferably larger) than the HDDs.
If the HDDs are boot drives, you'll want to do a clone which copies every file sector by sector, including the boot partition. If you just need to movie files, you can just copy and paste from one drive to the other.
For cloning, if you want user friendly, use something like Acronis or its competitors. I believe you will have to pay for a license. It should be relatively cheap.
You can also use something like Clonezilla which is free but a little more involved and more powerful.
In addition to your media, I would highly advise you use a tool such as Clonezilla or Macrium Reflect to make a backup of your main PC before you go. Depending on your NAS, you could even go so far as to use FOG. Make sure you know how to restore everything safely from your backup and have a couple of USB drives with the right Live Media to get yourself going again.
You gain the benefits of fast storage on your PC while also not being SOL should Windows turns into broken glass.
Don't use easeus. It's garbage.
I was lazy and used it because I was lazy.
I cloned my hdd to ssd, but it messed up the 4k alignment.
I had to reclone using using clonezilla live.
You can either physically move the drive to the new machine or clone it and put it on the new drive.
Either way, run an update and upgrade so the system can pickup the hardware changes.
Note that the Windows 10 upgrade ("upgrade") process is:
- irreversible
- notorious for occasionally deleting all of your things even if you tell it not to
Thus, I recommend performing a full system backup using something like CloneZilla before following these instructions. Sorry the CSS is still bad, but all of this is a link to a tutorial. Link ends here. You'll need a device bigger than your computer's hard drive (like an external HDD) to save the backup to, but given that you're still using WIndows 7 your computer's hard drive is probably small enough that you'll be able to buy one.
If you have a configured system that you're happy with, I would recommend:
- Backup your data files to an external drive.
- Get a copy of Clonezilla and create a bootable Clonezilla USB.
- Use Clonezilla to image your current disk setup to an external drive.
- Install your new distro.
- Restore your data files.
- If you like your new distro, make an image of it as well.
- If you want to go back to an earlier distro, you can use Clonezilla images and data backups to restore a saved configuration.
The biggest gotcha in distro hopping is that your "per user" settings (stored in your home directory) can get a bit messed up when moving between distros -- especially when changing Desktop Environments. That is why I would recommend saving your data files (music, libreoffice files, pictures, etc.) and recreating the /home directory on the new distro.
The other advantage to the above is that you get a fresh backup of your files -- which is never a bad thing...
Clonezilla and Macrium Reflect are free and recommended here. If you have some money to throw at it I personally recommend Acronis TrueImage.
This guide below shows a Disk to Disk clone. If you do this, you WILL LOSE the data on the destination. Im posting it so you can see screenshots of clonezilla. You'd want to follow some of these steps, except instead of selecting disk to disk, you'd select disk to image: https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone
Here is a disk to image guide with Macrium Reflect: https://reflect.macrium.com/webtutorial/How_to_create_a_disk_image.asp
If your NVMe is as large as, or larger than the amount of space taken up on the old SSD, you can use Clonezilla (free as in speech) or Acronis True Image (a retail backup/cloning package) to clone it. Just don't expect much improvement over boot/loading times from a SATA SSD to an NVMe drive. The speed advantage of NVMe storage is only seen during large contiguous read/write operations (ideal for dealing with 4K raw video footage files.)
If you want to only use tools available in Windows, then go to Settings -> Backup -> Backup and Restore (Windows 7) and choose "Create a system image" in the top left corner. This will let you make an image of your entire disk and save it to an external hard drive. You can then restore it using either a bootable system repair disc (which you're given an option to make upon completing the backup, or you can just hit the option under "Create a system image" to do it at any time) or a regular Windows 10 installation medium made with the Media Creation Tool (just choose "Repair this computer" when given the option and then "Restore a system image").
If you want more flexibility, however, I highly recommend Clonezilla, which is an excellent bootable Linux-based tool for doing the same thing but has many additional features such as compression, encryption, image validation, etc. It might be overkill for just transferring a Windows install to a new disk, however, and you should be totally fine with just using Windows' built-in options if you so choose.
If you're doing a clean Windows install why not just install to the SSD?
The easiest way to clone one disk to another is by using cloning tools, like Clonezilla or Acronis. Acronis is easier to use but it's commercial software, but sometimes if you buy a new SSD it comes with an included license.
Clonezilla, it's free.
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- Get as much off of C: as you can - leaving just the core OS and your programs (move your Docs, etc. if you have a lot). Clear out Temp files, etc. with Disk Cleanup. You'll obviously want everything off your SSD too, as you're about to wipe it..
- Download and copy Clonezilla to a USB stick or a blank CD.
- Boot you PC up with your Clonezilla media. Follow the instructions for a drive-to-drive clone. Make sure you choose the spinny disks as the source, and the SSD as the destination.
- Let it do it's thang.
- Shutdown, then ensure your SSD is now set as the Primary Boot device.
- Restart Windows 10. As a boot drive change is not significant, you shouldn't need to re-activate.
- If the SSD seems fine and you're happy, use Disk Manager to blat all the partitions off your old spinny disk and create a new drive for storing your data, etc. on.
Yes, you can clone your current drive to a BLANK external device (or create an image if you don't want to wipe an entire external drive) and then restore that clone or image to your replacement laptop drive. Most retail box drives come with software to do this, otherwise there's Clonezilla (free as in speech) or Acronis (retail product though it does come bundled with some drives).
Consider using Clonezilla. The procedure is fairly simple especially if you are cloning to a drive of the same size or bigger.
Use clonezilla to image the disk, store the image on a network share or usb drive, and you can restore it to it's previous state at a later time.
If you have a clean Windows install that works smoothly and just the way you like it, the best option is just to use a cloning tool like Clonezilla to migrate everything off your 320GB drive to the new drive, then just remove the 320GB to return it. It'll act exactly the same way as your existing drive since you'll have exactly the same data on it.
> Is there a possibility that this HD ain't really broken?
There's a strong possibility your old drive works fine, it's hard to tell without more info
I don't know about best but EaseUS Backup worked for me. I used it to clone many systems using a mechanical hdd to a smaller ssd. I used the free version.
Other software that I have used is Clonezilla. It was very fast but only supports going from same size to same size drive or smaller drive to bigger. It doesn't work going from larger drive to smaller drive.
Regarding the gparted livecd: It doesn't include clonezilla ... but it does include partclone and partimage (which might do the same thing?). One might consider an offshoot of the gparted livecd called the "GParted-Clonezilla LiveCD" ( https://clonezilla.org/related-live-cd/001_gparted-clonezilla/more_info.php )
Copying all the files may not be a good solution in this case. I would recommend that you use a hard drive imaging software like Clonezilla and follow this guide for disk to disk clone.
However, you should be very careful before starting to do this because intensive operations like cloning could cause further damage to your already failing HDD, depending on why it is failing.
If you play hard like me, you will break it. Once you're happy with it you'll want clonezilla to image the disk. I Imaged a dual boot 80 Gigs used data drive into a 40 Gig disk image. You'd like that.
Image it. There are many different solutions ranging in complexity and features. Probably the easiest free option is Clonezilla. You would create a bootable USB drive with the Clonezilla live environment, plug in the drive to backup to, and in Clonezilla create a full disk image saved to the backup drive. If you ever want to restore it, just boot back into Clonezilla, choose the image, and write it back to the HDD. This method is the most reliable way to backup a system and get it restored to a specific state quickly. This is a good practice anyway since your laptop is your livelihood. Any mission-critical machine should have working images to restore.
Make sure you make a backup of your backup image. A backup image is useless if you back it up to an external HDD that fails when you need it.
> The computers can be wiped if necessary. I am not sure about the domain controller.
If they're on a DC then I wouldn't wipe them as you would now have tombstoned objects on your DC that you would need to delete, then you would need to rename every PC as well as rejoin them to the domain and setup the shares again. Who setup these PCs and the file server, and how did you become responsible for updating them? What version of Windows are they running?
You should be able to open up your system properties window on the computers and see under the "Computer name, domain, and workgroup settings" if it shows they're a member of a "Workgroup" or a "Domain". If they're a member of a domain, take your hands off the keyboard, back away slowly, and phone the person that manages the lab network. They should be responsible for doing any updates and on a domain it's easy since you push a few MSI files over the network and everything "just works" (this is why Windows is popular in office environments.)
Otherwise if they're members of a workgroup and there's nothing special about any particular PC (any configuration or anything like that) you could setup one PC the way you like it and then clone it using Clonezilla. You can set it up to do a network boot and do all the PCs at once (hopefully over a gigabit network with a very fast server hosting the image files), or pickup a few USB 3.0 thumb drives (or portable hard drives) with a copy of the image file and go around doing 3 or 4 at a time.
> Nakon sta sve instaliras napravi sliku diska pa samo vratis ubuduce ako je potrebno
Meh, ja radio pa kad treba reinstalirati vidim da se u međuvremenu toliko toga izmijenio, updejtalo, instalirao, deinstaliralo da mi je jednostavnije krenut iz početka.
> Samo oprezno pri skidanju softvera za to
You can get Clonezilla for free, or Acronis is another option that might even come with your SSD if you buy a retail box.
> Would that involve booting with a live usb and burning something like an .img file to the drive from within that?
Yes...
Check out Clonezilla
You can do both backup and restores of disk images.
>2) If not: I would use Clonezilla to backup the old drive to a "normal" external harddrive, swap the SSD drives and restore from the external drive. Any potential pittfalls with this procedure? Can I just change the partition size on the new drive to use all available memory?
Using Clonezilla just make disk-to-disk clone and then extend the logical volume size in Disk Management tool (if you are using Windows). https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone
Technically, you could probably just dd directly to the new SSD if you have USB adapter for it...but I'm not sure if you can dd from the "active" drive ...(?).
Either way, my suggestion would be to use Clonezilla for this. To do this, you'll need the following:
A USB flash drive or CD/DVD to boot Clonezilla
A USB storage device to write your backup image. It should be large enough to fit the entire contents of your current drive.
Download it and create a bootable CD/DVD or USB. Shutdown your system, boot to the Clonezilla disk, and then create a backup image of your drive to external storage. Install the new SSD, then boot to Clonezilla again and restore the image to the new drive.
Just be sure to read the instructions and prompts very carefully. Failure to designate your "source" and "destination" correctly could result in over-writing your hard drive...otherwise the program makes doing this sort of thing fairly easy and straight forward.
Since you need the safest solution that does the job, I suggest you take a look at CloneZilla. I used to go with it for years without any issues. Just make disk to disk or disk to image cloning and you are done.
https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone
https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/01_Save_disk_image
Here's a useful tip, I come to depend on when tinkering with my computers: Get yourself an 8GB USB drive and a reasonable sized USB external hard disk; Download a copy of CloneZilla and put it on the USB drive, make a backup of your laptop and start messing to your hearts content. When you mess up you can always restore from the USB hard disk. CloneZilla can backup all filesystems, be it macOS, Windows fat/NTFS/exFAT and Linux Ext4 or a mix of all 3.
A hard disk restore is only a few clicks away like this.
Oh copying exactly a drive bit for bit is a difficult thing to do but not impossible. The worst part about this whole ordeal is dd. It's called disk destroyer for a reason. Anyway, using it requires a lot of proof reading and knowledge regarding the steps you should do. For example if your original disk is, I don't know, 500GB and your cloning target it 480GB. That will require also using resize2fs, tune2fs, e2fsck, fdisk, oh and fucking around with fstab. Just all the disk management tools.
And also your mistake; not running grub-install after cloning. (I assume you were talking about the target disk because wow the fuck it would affect your original disk I have no idea)
Oh you don't want a headache? Use Clonezilla. (I still prefer the command line method because of me being a complete psychopath. Also I use OpenBSD, the better UNIX-like operating system)
PS: Almost forgot, cloning a drive bit for bit will never "just work". You need that toolchain.
> but my newer desktop can if that works
You can use any computer you want to burn the disk, the old computer just needs to be able to boot from it. Go to the following page, download the ISO and burn it. I believe you need to choose "i686" for CPU architecture and "ISO" as file type.
https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php
After that you try to boot from it on the old computer (maybe try to book on the newer, just to check if it's OK) and we deal with the next steps.
You can make a backup using Clonezilla or Ghost cloning software by making a disk-to-image clone. Once you get the image, create a VM, boot Clonezilla and restore the image to the VM. https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/01\_Save\_disk\_image
You probably have 1 of 2 issues.
1) The simple one: You cloned the drive letter/MBR, and with both drives connected, your PC is having a conflict that prevents booting. Unplug the HDD and test with only the SDD.
2) The clone tool wasn't properly configured, so you have an issue rendering the cloned copy un-bootable (disk-to-image instead of disk-to-disk, forgot to move MBR, etc)
Not sure what cloning software you're using, my preference is Clonezilla as a bootable USB key. I've had a lot of issues with software that runs in the OS, running off a separate USB drive has been far more reliable.
You can add more drives, and have those drives connect at specific directories or show up as additional letters, but only one drive can occupy a letter at a time.
If you want to leave your existing drive in-place you could mount a new drive as C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86); if you want to mount the new drive in both places you would need to carve the drive into multiple partitions then mount each one separately.
Another option would be to use a program like clonezilla to copy the existing drive sector for sector to the new drive, then resize the primary partition to take up the entire drive. This is what I usually do as it's much easier, but it does require you either have a large enough data store somewhere for the disk images or an empty drive bay in your computer case to plug in both drives at once.
Normally is suggest something like Clonezilla, but you went and got all complicated by only wanting to copy some data to a smaller drive.
Given this, your best bet is to do a clean install on the new drive, then import the data you want from the old. You could try doing something really stupid like copying the partition map and boot sector using a tool like dd, then copy over the OS files but that is incredibly involved and not really worth the effort.
- If your USB stick is not using any "persistent" features then your Pop_OS is just a generic read-only setup. It has nothing special to keep, nothing super-important to save. You'd be better with a fresh install onto the SSD/HDD than "cloning" the USB partition(s).
- If your USB stick is using a regular "persistent" feature (like casper-rw) then you'll get no real benefit in cloning it to a SSD/HDD. Once again you'd be better with a fresh install onto the SSD/HDD than "cloning"
- The only scenario where cloning the USB stick to a SSD/HDD would would prove to be worthy is the one where you got your "persistence" by manually creating specific partitions on the USB stick (instead of some "casper-rw"-like persistent file). For this scenario I recommend either <strong>Clonezilla</strong> or <strong>Rescuezilla</strong>
Another thing you could do is use a backup program. There's the FOSS Clonezilla and FoxClone (a GUI frontend for Clonezilla) that can clone your Windows in a compressed format so you can save it to any external storage drive, rather than a 1:1 clone to another HDD (which they can also do).
As the other commenter said, this probably won’t fix the issue. If you want to try anyways, download clonezilla here, then download balenaetcher here. Use etcher to put the clonezilla iso onto a flash drive, it will make it bootable. Boot the PC with both the old SSD and new one plugged in (if possible). Boot onto the usb drive, then follow the instructions. If you can have both SSDs plugged in then you can clone across directly. If not, you can create an image onto the HDD, then clone that image onto the new SSD.
Bootloader is also transferred across, so as long as only the new SSD is in the PC, windows will boot no issue
As mentioned, you can make a backup using Clonezilla or Ghost cloning software by making a disk-to-image clone. https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/01\_Save\_disk\_image
As an alternative, you can use Disk2VHD or Starwinds converter to make an image of a drive. It is useful when you need to back up the running machine (without any shutdown). VHD image you can use to recover to a physical or virtual machine.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd
There is a free app called Clonezilla. You'll probably need an adapter for the new SSD. SSD' to USB. Then plug it into a USB port on the computer and clone away. Then swap drives. Good luck.
I just replaced my laptops SSD for a bigger one. I just cloned the original SSD to my new SSD with clonezilla.
Since my new SSD was bigger the oy thing I needed to do was to use a manjaro USB live stick to enlarge the partition afterwards.
But cloning is your best bet.
1) "Am I able to have a second SSD?"
Which power supply is yours? generally power suplies have other socket to put another sata devices
2) "I can transfer my smaller SSD data onto the larger one?"
Cloning is easy if you are trying from a smaller to a larger ssd, try search about Clonezilla,
i use in my work place sometimes
​
hope it helps!! :)
You can image your current drive to a file on a large enough internal or external drive with for instance Clonezilla, swap the M.2 SSDs, and restore the image to the new M.2 SSD. To do this you need a large enough drive to hold the image.
Do yourself a favor and grab for your USB drive:
https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy
Plop
https://clonezilla.org/downloads/download.php?branch=stable
And
On it.
You can just clone your drive assuming capacities are similar. If your NVME is smaller than your SATA SSD then you'd have to shrink it to fit first.
When it's done cloning, the UUIDs will be the same so I'd recommend unplugging your data drive afterwards until you can edit your FSTAB to not freak out.
If anyone else has a better idea let op know.
If you're looking to clone a drive. I would use clonezilla or borg
If it's windows then well, you're probably asking the wrong subreddit.
For your reasonably modern machines, I'd recommend either ...
For your Windows XP legacy machine, create a bootable CloneZilla thumb drive, boot the machine from the thumbdrive and pull an ISO image of the internal disk onto an external HDD.
I would go with proxmox 2 ssds mirror, but if you don't want to reinstall you can use clonezilla to clone the 2TB into a image disk and then recreate that image into one of the 256GB ssd, and using the other ones for storage/vms/backups. With clonezilla you can clone/image only the used sectors of a hdd not need for a whole disk with empty spaces and also support LVM version 2, good luck.
Clonezilla is simple, free and reliable: https://clonezilla.org/
Backup your data in case something goes wrong. Download Clonezilla live and put it on a USB drive. Make sure both SSDs are connected. Boot from the USB drive, select disk-to-disk, beginner mode and use the default settings. Afterwards, boot from the new SSD (you could shutdown after Clonezilla finished and unplug the old SSD), launch gparted and resize the partition (if necessary). If gparted prompts you to fix the size of the partition table, let it do its thing.
Nothing is going to carry over on its own. If this is a boot drive you may want to simply clone the drive using a tool like Clonezilla. If you don't set up a new boot drive at all then you won't have any operating system to boot into. If this is a secondary drive (and you have the ability to connect at least 3 drives) then you can just have them both plugged in at once and copy over whatever files you need before disconnecting the old drive.
First make sure you have a whole copy of the faulty drive. I would recommend booting Clonezilla from an USB drive and clone to the most similar drive you have. After that you can experiment with the clone as you like without having to worry of damaging the original faulty drive. You can also create multiple clones to be on the safe side. If the clone process already fails then you probably have really a bad disk. After creating the clone you can mount the Synology volume on Ubuntu like described here. Lastly: Use RAID or other types of drive redundancy for preventing future loss of data through bad disks. AND ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA!
a screenshot walk through of creating a clonezilla image of a drive: https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/01_Save_disk_image
That is possible, if your new SSD is bigger than your old SSD you can consider something like https://clonezilla.org/ - you can install this on a USB stick, boot to it, and choose a source and target.
The reason I say bigger is that ssd manufacturers may, for example, state their drives are 256gb, but one may be 250 and the other 260 - if your old device was 260 it can't directly be cloned to the 250 without adaption.
Only do this if your old SSD really is functional enough to copy, if it is failing then the extra writes might finally kill it and make data irretrievable, so at the very least back up the most important items manually before attempting to clone.
according to the website, clonezilla does not work on live systems:
>Online imaging/cloning is not implemented yet. The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted.
from: https://clonezilla.org/
the cloned images are compressed.